Remember Mario Kart Tour? I certainly don’t. It’s very easy for fans to forget that there were actually a couple of Mario Kart games released in between 8 and World. One of them being Home Circuit, from the guys who recently brought us the Star Fox Remake… and the other being Mario Kart Tour.
Mario Kart Tour is a very interesting game because it came about due to shareholder demands that Nintendo start producing microtransaction heavy games for mobile devices. The idea, at the time, was that phones were making traditional video game consoles obsolete. As mobile gaming grew and evolved, it was going to obviously destroy the dedicated very game business. This did not happen, of course- traditional gaming consoles did not go anywhere. But that is shareholder thinking for you. None of these people know a thing about what they’re talking about. In spite of having a massive push, hardly any of Nintendo’s mobile games got any real traction at all. Mario Run was laughed at for its $10 price point, Mario Kart Tour was seen as being infinitely inferior to traditional Mario Kart games, and Dragalia Lost and Dr. Mario World have been shut down and forgotten a long time ago.
There have been major mobile Nintendo success stories- Fire Emblem Heroes was actually by far the most successful game that Nintendo developed internally and is still being supported to this day- but there is no denying that the idea of ten years ago- that Nintendo would shut down their traditional console business to focus exclusively on mobile gaming- simply did not come to pass.
I feel as if people don’t truly grasp what a big deal this is. Traditionally people had this idea that the instant something more interesting came around that Nintendo would fall off completely. The idea was that because iphones were so ubiquitous, that it would by extension make Nintendo a ‘niche’ item.
We live in a world where kids are growing up glued to their ipads and refuse to do anything else- and yet Nintendo is still very much relevant. The idea that mobile gaming would quickly and easily become Nintendo’s most profitable venture, in practice, never came to fruition. In the end the Nintendo mobile apps do nothing but PROMOTE their brand, creating brand synergy and ensuring that even the most obsessed ipad kid knows about traditional gaming hardware.
And it is becoming more clear that gaming consoles such as Nintendo Switch 2 have certain advantages over ipads. They are less expensive, play better games, and can grow and evolve in ways that the ipad cannot. Nintendo consoles may be a comparatively ‘niche’ thing compared to ipad- but what that means in practice is that it is just a more specialized product. You will NEVER see iphones or ipads replace every single other piece of technology in a home. People still own TVs and PCs even though, ostensibly, ‘Apple can do dat.’ Everyone owns an iphone: everyone owns an ipad. And yet somehow, curiously, it has not stopped Nintendo from being successful.
Apple products at one point reached complete market saturation and still could not destroy Nintendo. The success of the iPhone led to the succre ess of Pokemon Go- one of the biggest mobile game releases ever. We have seen situations where mobile games see successful console ports or upgraded re-releases- while console games that go mobile crash and burn. We have seen how dedicated gaming hardware, by it’s nature, attracts more people who are actually willing to pay money for video games, while most iphone users gravitate mostly to free to play titles that will always be cheap and disposable.
It says a lot about the iphone industry where the community can rally around this idea that they can emulate thirty year old Nintendo games on their phone instead of playing brand new ones. It says a lot about them that they are more interested in how much money a game makes than how it plays.
Mobile gaming is, absolutely, one of the worst things to happen to the industry. The recent attempts at glazing it and saying it’s an important part of the culture are completely delusional. Mobile gaming has been a thing for almost twenty years now, and it is becoming increasingly obvious every year that the industry cannot even compete with the simplest of Nintendo games. But we can’t acknowledge that, because if we were to do so that would be admitting that Nintendo managed to beat the most iconic piece of technology this century in their industry.
Nintendo breaking into the mobile scene was a bad thing. None of the games they have produced on the platform have been worth bothering with at all. It doesn’t really matter how much money they bring in and what they have accomplish on the platform. Something like Pokemon GO was never going to be better than a mainline Pokemon game, simply due to the nature of the platform. These are, without exception, objectively bad games and Nintendo would be better off if they didn’t have to make them. But as I said before- the iPad generation are some of the lowest IQ, brain dead individuals imaginable. Nintendo needs to be on that platform in some capacity to promote their brand to that demographic, but the games themselves are very stale and disposable. Truth be told- I don’t even see them as ‘real’ Nintendo games.
I mentioned early on in the article how it truly feels as if no one in the Mario Kart community even truly cared about Mario Kart Tour, and I think now that the game has shut down completely there isn’t a single person who will look back on it fondly. The best thing that will ever happen to a Maro Kart Tour player is discovering a real Mario Kart- just as the best thing that could happen to an ipad kid is discovering a Nintendo console. Nintendo is the ‘premium’ brand when it comes to gaming, and anyone who is remotely honest with themselves is forced to acknowledge that Nintendo’s brand is far stronger than Apple’s when it comes to gaming. Apple Arcade will never, ever be a thing while Nintendo dominates the entire gaming industry.
iphones and ipads will never be a dominant gaming platform because that simply isn’t what people are buying them for. They are basic pieces of technology that are used for basic things. They can do more than that- I use my tablet for my writing career, for example- but the idea that people had that they would completely eclipse other pieces of more specialized technology has proven itself to be wrong.
Mario Kart Tour is an example of how a mobile game could never ever compete with its console based counterparts. It was a simple, boring game that disappointed anyone who tried it. Shutting the game down after such a tepid life cycle should be seen as a blessing- but like most of the best things in life people just sort of take it for granted. Nintendo is moving away from the mobile market because they understand that the entire industry is carried by whales who will pour money into JPG images of anime girls instead of playing actual video games, and they are all the better for it.
Nintendo will continue to produce mobile apps- but only as a promotional tool for their primary business. The days of pretending that mobile development would take over the entire business are long behind us.